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Gender bending the rules for Caster Semenya

26 August 2009

IN 1957 female high jumper Dora Ratjen made an amazing confession&colon; she was a man. Ratjen (real name Hermann), who had competed for Germany in the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin and broke the women’s world record two years later, said that Nazi officials had persuaded him to masquerade as a woman to bring glory to the Reich.

International athletics has often had an uneasy relationship with gender. From 1966 to 1996 female athletes were routinely genetically tested to confirm that they were women, following rumours that Soviet-bloc countries were entering male athletes in women’s events. Despite this scrutiny, Ratjen’s …